Decoding the Gurus - Special Episode: Interview with Phrost on Bullshido

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Matt and Chris are helped again by a guest in their endless quest to get the bottom of what the Hell is Going On and What It's All About.Phrost describes himself as "the world's most dangeous nerd" and is not only an expert in the fighting arts (like, actual real fighting) but is also no slouch when it comes to combatting bullshit.He identifies as a soldier, a scientist, and as a shill for "Big Reality".And his site bullshido.net as well as his podcast The Art of Fighting BS comes up with the reality-based goods. Not only in debunking bullshit in martial arts but also with regard to miracle health cures, supplements, pop psychology, COVID and many other honey traps for the curious and the unwary.Tune in as Matt and Chris compares notes with Phrost on how and why people delude themselves. Marvel at Phrost's offers to fight Alex Jones, Steven Seagal, and (gasp) Gwenyth Paltrow (for Science!). Matt himself accepts the the offer to fight Phrost, conditional on him being ensconced comfortably within a properly equipped Armoured Fighting Vehincle.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world have to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is chris cavanaugh and we have with us a guest today following in our great tradition of inviting people on who know more about these topics than we do and uh yeah we're happy would you like to introduce our guest chris yes so great tradition of two previous interviews but i you know that's that's how traditions start. This is a new, inventive tradition on our part. But yes, so the guest today is Frost, who you may know if you're on Twitter, and you

may also know if you've been involved with martial arts, or at least talking about martial arts online through his website, Bullshido, the art of fighting bullshit, I guess, in martial arts and more generally. And there's also a new podcast with the same title. Yes. So welcome, Frost. Nice to be here. Yes.

And I should also mention that is a username or pseudonym. We have not got Jack Frost or somebody from the- I haven't changed it. Yeah. And it's Frost with a PH in case anybody is looking to stalk you online. These are important ways that people can find things. There's a long and nerdy history behind that, things so there's a long and nerdy history behind that which nobody's interested in so we talked about the the use of having pseudonyms online or just used to be user names and as we're both well aware matt has a pseudonymous account on twitter where he's r4 sedent and maintains complete anonymity and separation from his actual identity. Yeah. Yes, everyone has been fooled.

Yes. You're very familiar with this concept, but yeah. So actually, Frost, I knew you back in the early internet times when message boards were the clubhouse of the time. And yeah, I was actually a moderator on a rival martial arts board called Martial Arts Planet, which in true form was the milk toast version of bullshido, right? There was no cursing allowed

and direct personal attacks were frowned upon, which wasn't the case of bullshido. But maybe that would be a good place to introduce for anyone who doesn't know what is Bullshido and the potted history of Bullshido. Yeah, yeah, no problem. Basically, we started way back in 2002. And like you said, there was no Facebook

or there wasn't even like MySpace back then. So forums were where you went to talk to other people about things and everybody had their own little community and sometimes communities had rivalries. And so it was interesting, the wild west of the internet, and I miss it terribly because everything's centralized and homogenized and just very, I don't know, bland. And we have a long history. We've gained some infamy. In fact, I think there was a Stanford journalism student that was doing his thesis on us

and described us as internet vigilantes at one point. That was fun. I have it saved somewhere. It was flattering to me. Yeah, Bullshido started out just as a platform for people to discuss things in an unfiltered, unrestricted, uncancellable sort of way to bring that up to modern times and yeah and quickly spiraled into a kind of an online fight

club which operated on at least four continents which that that was that's hilarious there's still videos all over youtube of random people from the internet getting together and beating the hell out of each other and i love that it's stuff. And then the other side of what we did was call bullshit on things. And that's how, how we really started. We call bullshit on something on another forum and got shut down. So we're like, let's start our own thing. And we did. And 20 years later, we're still kind of doing it the last 10 years, seven or eight, you know, of doing it the last 10 years seven or eight you know for real we got away from the martial arts because we realized that only the most delusional people are still believing in the the wackier stuff that we use to debunk no touch knockouts or chi ki abilities or you know aikido being

effective as a fighting style, those sorts of things. It was just, we weren't even like picking low hanging fruit. We were stepping on it. So we got tired of it. And I personally realized that we're, we need to start expanding our scope because a lot of people are getting screwed and taken advantage of just because they don't know how to process all of the information that's flooding in at them and um so there were so many bigger issues that were just pure bullshit that we had to go after within our frame of reference so we started getting into health and fitness and you guys know that the supplement industry is just rife with absolute garbage and that kind of overlaps into some of

what you guys have seen since you started this because if it's a it's an easy heuristic if somebody's selling supplements they're probably full of shit uh and a lot of those guys see i couldn't agree more go please go on yeah yeah we started getting in that and then just and then 2015 rolled around and we started seeing a lot more weaponized bullshit. People started using that more toward to affect their political agenda. I mean, yeah, there's always been disinformation, misinformation, propaganda. It's just spread. And so we became aware of it. We were starting to try and every now and then a meme would pop up that was just garbage and we would debunk that and we would post it on our Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and that sort of thing. So we just got a little bit more invested in it. And then 2016 happened and we try to stay politically neutral.

I think the media bias fact check group rated us as one of the least biased sites on the internet. But it's tricky. We're trying to walk a thin line when one side yeah they're typical political bs but the other side that's their mo that's what they do that's a go-to they rely on it oh yeah so we still we're threading that needle and it's i'm interested to see where the next couple of years are going to go. If we can just say, hey, this is wrong and stand in the middle.

Not that we want to be in the middle because of any particular agenda, but we're there because the extremes are dominating the conversation. And yeah, there's not much honesty on either side of the far left or right. the far left or right. Yeah, that sounds like a really valuable goal to have, which is to not necessarily be politically neutral yourself, you have your own personal opinions, but to try as much as you can to put that aside and take an objective and critical view of stuff rather than being partisan about it. There seems to be a decreasing number of places where one can get that kind of commentary or just advice yeah and we don't run ads so that helps so we have nobody trying to you know push an agenda through us we're just we get a couple donations here and there but mostly i fund it out of my own pocket which you know so yeah we're not

beholden to anybody the like i like you said when you when you try to take a more objective perspective on that i i think that the mistake that some people make is to imagine that means that you have to spend 50 of your time criticizing the democrats and 50 of republicans but like you said and you've commented many times as well it isn't an equally distributed amount of bullshit at the minute, like with Trump and the Republican Party, by the looks of CPAC, like one side is really heavily invested as its identity rather than it being something which deserves criticism and is incidental. So yeah, I think I've talked about a distinction between centrism or just moderate left or moderate and then the enlightened version of that, which is just saying that everything

has to be seen as equal, otherwise you're displaying your bias. So it sounds that you're not enlightened centrists. You're not classical liberals. No, it's wherever the bullshit lies. The only, the only caveat to that is that we have to, like I said,

thread the needle because if all we do, if all we did for the last four years was post about Trump and I try to avoid the guy's name as much as possible. If all we did was call out the BS, even if there were only, there were 99 Trump BS things, news stories, and then one, I don't know, non-Trump thing on the left, it would look like we're doing it. We have to do that balance editorially. But yeah, this balance still was towards the right because come on. Yeah.

So there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to ask you about, but going back to the earlier era, when you were more focused on the kind of frauds, it might be like a harsh word for it, but at least the people that were prone to hyperbole and there was a significant amount of martial arts gurus around martial arts communities. Both, I think they're overrepresented in traditional martial arts, but they also existed in mixed martial arts and even sports where there is a sporting aspect of it. to ask you, from those experiences, do you see the kind of modern gurus that we see in the political sphere or the health and wellness sphere? Is there a big distinction between the kinds of characters that were active in the martial arts sphere? Or is it there's very much a continuum and they're all doing similar sorts of things? I think they, it operates on a certain level because they,

all those gurus, especially in the martial arts appeal to aspirational ideas about what you want to be, what you want to be seen as. And for a lot of guys, a lot of guys that don't really have any status or anything that they've really accomplished in their lives, martial arts super appeals to them because at least they can beat their chest and puff it out and pursue some sort of status by having the illusion of being a tough guy or a badass. And that's what they sell period in the martial arts in general, except for the kids. And then that's like self-discipline and that kind of nonsense. But so yeah, I think all the, if you'll allow me to use the term evolutionary hooks are there and they're exploited in the exact same way that a lot of the stuff that you're seeing

today, a lot of the gurus are exploiting. It's just, yeah, they're, they're the, the glitches in the system that you can't, the, the things that you're at your, you have inherent that people are taking advantage of to sell their bullshit. Yeah. So that's an interesting comparison, isn't it, between the martial arts field and more the health and wellness. And there's a bit of overlap, of course, with the health and supplements and improving one's body.

And the thing that our last guest emphasized to us was this sort of streak of individualism and almost narcissism that is sometimes present in the health and wellness communities, because they're very much against things like vaccinations or community-wide stuff. And they're really into personal things that you can buy to maximize your own personal thing. Is that the same kind of appeal that underlies the bullshit in the martial arts space? Yeah, I would think that on one level, it's appealing to a sort of an image that you want to promote, like rugged, individualist, masculine in a lot of cases, because, you know,

overwhelming people that participate in martial arts are men and are looking for that badass angle. And so if you defer to someone else's expertise, then some people take that as a ding against themselves. And I don't want to show any weakness whatsoever. So I'm not going to trust that squirrely little guy at the National Institutes of Health or wherever Fauci's working these days. Yeah, I'm not going to trust that guy when I can take charge of my own health,

I'm not going to believe you about wearing a mask. That makes me, let's just say, put it out there in R-rated form. That makes me this guy's bitch by wearing a mask. Whereas I'm a tough guy. I'll breathe my own air. So yeah, I don't like the term toxic masculinity because that's kind of gotten twisted a little bit. But I think, yeah, it is masculinity taken to a toxic

level. And yeah, yeah. That seems to fit Joe Rogan's approach to health and wellness or, or in general, like brain performance. Like he's somebody who I think would be relatively open to recognizing the frauds and bullshit that exist in martial arts. He still has a bit of exoticism in him, but he knows an old Tai Chi master is not going to defeat an MMA fighter. But yet he definitely does have the view that your health and the response to this pandemic should be focused around vitamin D supplements and like working out. And there's a kernel of truth,

of course, being fit and healthy and not having vitamin deficiencies is important to health, but it definitely seems that there's an element broken in the sphere of martial arts that it's about taking supplements and he's also into cryotherapy and a whole bunch of out there things. But I guess I wonder, do you think that's something specific to him?

Or is that the more broader thing within, say, the MMA side of martial arts? When COVID hit and was starting to pick up, we had so many arguments on everything, Instagram of all places, with people that were like, no, we're going to keep training. We don't need to do this. I don't care what they say. And a lot of it had to be more cynical. I want to keep my gym open. I want to keep making money because they're small businesses. businesses. And then you have the knuckle guys that flagrantly were like bragging about it. It's like, we're holding gym, but look at us. We're here. Come train, take, leave your mask off. We don't believe in any of that crap. And I don't know what the principle is. I forget what it is, but I know it translates over. If you think you're an expert in one area, then you automatically assume to some extent, you're, you're an expert in another area. It's like, you've earned a sort of expertise in martial arts or MMA or jujitsu. And so somehow that transfers over into immunology.

So, and for a lot of these guys, they know one thing very well. And again, we go back to the masculinity thing. It's a ding against them to not know. It didn't be reliant on somebody else who knows those things. And Joe Rogan is a good example of that.

He doesn't see, he'll call out the bullshit in MA or martial arts, MMA, whatever, because he's an expert in that. But he just can't translate that expertise over into how you produce antibodies. So, yeah, that's interesting. I thought about the psychological basis for COVID skepticism a lot, but I've never actually thought about the masculinity angle. And you've made it quite clear that the public health advice regarding dealing with the vaccine is to a certain kind of guy feels like something a pussy would do, right? So, you know,

hide at home, close everything down. Oh, no, I'm scared. No, their idea is they don't care. They're tough. They're brave. They'll eat some spinach and go train. Yeah. Yeah. And if you notice in the early days of the lockdown protests, all these guys in their tactical knockoff gear were protesting the lockdowns and they were wearing masks. They were wearing masks because it hadn't been politicized yet. And because masks are cool. The military wears masks. I have tactical smogs and all that crap.

And they're like, look. and a few months and those assholes were in the capitol building not wearing masks committing insurrection and so desperate to be aligned with the politics that they wouldn't cover their faces yeah figure that one we it probably relates to the points that you've already made for us but somebody on our patreon when they heard that you were on wanted to ask about the gracie's response to and i know there's a lot of Gracie's, right? They have a lot of kids. So there's a wide spread, but I haven't been tracking them, but I get the impression from this that what you're describing about people saying we're going to keep things open and that it isn't a serious thing that at least some elements of the Gracie Brazilian, and for people

who don't know, this is the family that are associated most strongly with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which involves a lot of close physical contact in training. So do you know anything about their response to this? One of them is, and I've forgotten his name. He's the guy that got completely smashed by Sakuraba in Pride, but I'm drawing a blank on his name.

There's one of the greats, like Hoist Gracie's cousin, major fighter, but I'm drawing a blank on it. But yeah, he's a huge fan of Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, major anti-masker himself. And so a lot of people

have taken their cues from him. And I, like I said, I've had arguments with these people where like, no, at least wear a mask. You're literally sweating into people's eyeballs. It's you're rubbing body fluids on each other. There's, they're doing the opposite of social distancing. There's no real effective way to train jujitsu unless you're in physical contact with somebody.

And in fact, who was the guy? There's some major dude in New Jersey, a super Chad looking dude, who I think he called me is some autistic lab coat from Bullshido. You know, me. For the people who are listening on audio, Frost doesn't look like an autistic lab coat wearer. I look good in a lab coat though. So I trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for a couple of years at university and when I came

over to Japan. And like you say, the notion that there is any possibility to train with physical distance, it doesn't seem feasible. But there is an issue there that people's livelihood, if that's what you do and that's what your whole business model and your whole self-identity is about, then I get it that this virus is a massive issue, not just for your health and that kind of thing, but your livelihood. And I, yeah, I got injured like prior to the pandemic and I've

now recovered. I had an operation and my knees got better, but I'm wondering long term what the impact of the virus is going to be on gyms and training, like if it persists. Yeah, it's not a question related to skepticism and gurus. I'm just wondering what the future is going to be for the martial arts that are involved. I know a couple of gym owners through the website. Stephen Kepfer, who is the president of the American Sambo Association. I don't know if you guys know Sambo. It's a Russian martial art. You get to punch people and throw them around. It's awesome. He has been conducting small classes in like a pod format. So he's basically gone private classes only with people that he knows are reliable to have been doing social distancing. So the pods model, there's no perfect solution to anything. It's just, there are better ones. It's risk mitigation, not a risk elimination with this. Yeah.

So I know people that are training. There's a couple, like there's a couple of Samba competitors in town. Austin has, you throw a rock, you hit a jujitsu school. A lot of them are doing the responsible thing by having groups of six. These are the people we're committed to social distancing. We're going to social distancing. We're going to do all the best we can. And so if one of us catches it,

then we stop, we shut down. So we test regularly as best we can and that kind of thing. It's good faith effort. And I think that's, for now, that's the model. But what I hope is just everybody gets vaccinated and then this is just

flu two electric boogaloo and we deal with it we get a boost over here yeah for sure it's a very real thing it's one thing if you work in in an office at like at a desk job where they can transition to working from home and one's livelihood isn't so badly affected but if you're running a restaurant or running a training gym of some kind, it's a very different level of impact. And so even though we often criticize COVID skeptics or whatever,

that's not to say that there aren't huge and valid concerns about the economic impacts it has on people. And those impacts are not equally distributed, are they? Yeah, I completely get it. There are guys that make their living traveling and competing and those guys need to train because they're still holding competitions which you know that's probably not the best thing but i mean that they've committed to this life and that's it and the the thing that we're trying to get across to them is okay yeah get your group of

core people lock yourselves inside the gym and train until this thing's over and then okay one of you starts coughing and stuff maybe chill out there's ways to do this without compromising everything that you're doing everybody just has to cut back a little bit at least okay so it feels like there's a bit of a false dichotomy in general around coronavirus and coronavirus skepticism we're the skeptics' presentation of the people who are supportive of public health measures is that they want lockdowns to continue. They don't want anything to open. They just want the government to control them and they're willing to accept any deprivation to just save one out of hundreds of thousands

of people. And the reality, as far as I see it, is just that everybody thinks that these restrictions are shit. Everybody wants them removed as soon as it's possible. But people are just willing to acknowledge that there's measures that are extremely inconvenient, cause problems for society, but until we get a handle on the vaccination that they're necessary. But now we might be getting there. Something optimistic might be around the corner. Maybe.

You guys have done so much better than we have up here. I don't know what, I think I have some ideas what the problem is, but countries on that side of the world, they've got this okay. They're pretty good. New Zealand's running around without masks. They're having barbecues. They're going to baseball games. Taiwan,

but they had like fewer than 10 deaths. The whole country. Vietnam, the same thing. And that's what I'm trying to get across to some of these people. Yeah, okay. Nobody wants to lock down.

Everybody's got to go to work. But if the entire country just somehow came together and just stayed the fuck home for a couple of weeks and just didn't just ordered some shit off Amazon, just chilled out. We would have we could have kicked the crap out of this. But now the minute the people, the government came in and said, hey, maybe you should stay home. We had our guys that ran around licking windows and rubbing on doorknobs and just doing whatever the hell they want.

Kissing rats. Just we know you americans feel about your government the whole world knows how americans and this is coming from somebody that i in my younger years was a raging libertarian i had a copy of atlas shrugged i was like yeah everybody live i'm gonna live my life for myself and i voted for bush so i i'm not i'm not like mr lefty with a shake reverse shirt or anything i know i i have look i personally have a lot of sympathy for libertarian thinking too like i feel if i want to take magic mushrooms and go for a hike naked in bear country then i don't that's up to me you know that's my choice i like that so

that's been on my mind just for the added risk factor okay i've been i've browsed bullshido.net before but i was just browsing again this. And it's a great website. People should have a look. And it's impressive the variety of topics you cover, like it's health and fitness and anti-vaxxers, as well as the kind of bullshit that occurs in arguments and so on. And it's just uniformly a rational sort of science-based approach that you're communicating so you obviously have been up close and personal with this stuff not just in martial arts but in other fields too and what i wanted to ask is whether or not you had a rough mental model or theory

of what's what's going on and i'll explain what I mean by giving you mine. Like my baseline, rough description of what's going on is people tend to be easily deluded or delude themselves on specific topics. Yeah, whether it's wearing a mask or not wanting to take a vaccine or that some supplement is going to

just do amazing things for them because they are congruent with their worldview their basic worldview how they look at the world that specific belief presses the right buttons and makes them feel more comfortable or somehow supports their general worldview do you have a mental model of what's generally going on we one of the things when we started transitioning into general bullshit, aside from martial arts, we still kept the martial arts analogy and it pairs nicely with just science in general.

If you think about it, because if you have, if the way you fight can be your skills can be falsified. So you can subject them or you can subject them to peer review usually involves getting a fist in the face. And that's how we stumbled our way into there with a little bit of head trauma. And so the analogy and we have a column that I write most of the articles for it because I'm a little bit more passionate about it than some of these other guys, but is self-defense against bullshit. at it as an analogy of martial arts, everybody can get better at self-defense against the kind of people that want to exploit them, take advantage of them, just all the gaps in the way we think, just the psychology behind it. And yeah, there's sort of things that people can use to just

bypass the higher order thinking and just appeal to the baser instincts. And so there's a lot of people that whether or not they're doing consciously or they're they literally know those hooks to the buttons to push. That's how a lot of the gurus and the the hucksters and the grifters take advantage of people. So you got to learn to see it. And for example, we have one of the articles about razors like think of Occam's razor and Hitchens razor, Hamlin's all of them. So we're an article about that just as a way to cut the bullshit so we're trying to expand on that that analogy and our audience is still a lot of people that are in martial arts a lot of knuckleheads a lot of guys that have lost a full standard deviation of IQ by

getting punched in the head so we're trying to explain all this to people that are reasonably dangerous so that's our hook is like I said, we started out in the early days, meeting up and beating the hell out of each other. We had, we've had people get into fights in person over discussions on the forums. We had, I think one of the most, there's a video of it on YouTube, a carload of people from Atlanta drove up to Maryland to get into a fight with a dude in the parking lot over an argument about Kung Fu. And it went completely sideways. Somebody threw a flying kick, ended up on the ground. And it was just, that's the kind of stuff we used to do.

It was like, I think we were the only online community where you could legitimately get the crap beaten out of you for something you said online. So we have people like that. And so the idea was to take these people who are a little rough around the edges, dangerous, and make them dangerously prepared to deal with that. Because you don't want those people being influenced against their best interests. So somebody that's completely willing to throw a punch against somebody, at least you can get them to throw a punch against somebody that deserves it. Yeah. So in that analogy, that makes us like a training gym you can send people to listen to decoding the gurus and i can i brought

you guys up yes as long as we take all the dangerousness and all the badassery out of the analogy then i think you could think of me as a trainer in a training gym. Frost, when you were talking about that, one thing that paralleled for me, my personal history, I started out like most kids interested in Kung Fu films and Bruce Lee and that kind of thing. So I started training in Wing Chun. And then I through exposure to martial arts forums, like Bullshitting on Martial Arts Planet, I became aware of the endless debates about the street versus the ring, right? These are akin to the great debates of creationist versus evolution, where on Martial Arts Planets, there was endless debates about referees and time limits and the dangers of the street, multiple opponents. But I ended up partly, I think, through exposure

to that and an interest in what you were talking about, like pressure testing things that I eventually migrated to doing Thai boxing when I moved to London for university. And through that, realized quite the world of difference that was involved in those kinds of things. And then over time, actually, I think partly through meetup that was half bullshito, half martial arts planner. It was a guy who was active on both forums and this big guy who was doing grappling stuff. So I went to a meetup with him and he was very kind, because he was also about five stone heavier than me, because he could have just destroyed me for sheer weight. But he introduced me to grappling and how little I knew about that whole world. And then I ended up starting doing

Brazilian jiu jitsu and judo. And that's where I kind of ended up staying. But that trajectory, it kind of mirrors, I think, in the way of where you might start off interested in, I don't know, conspiracy theories about 9-11 online or supplement ancient aliens, whatever it is. And then you start to see the cracks and you come across more skeptical voices. And then you might over time become more interested in science and stuff. And it seems that there's definite parallels where you're bumping up against reality. And you're doing things like resources like Bushido or now with the rise of YouTube videos and that, that you can actually see the

like ancient master with the no touch knockout get beaten up quite badly. So it, I don't know, it kind of, it's just echoing what you said, but it feels like you and your, the website in large part has won that battle in martial arts. i'm not saying there's no mcdojos there's no thing but there's it certainly feels like it would be hard to maintain the uh a lot of the myths that used to be dominant yeah no we probably could have done a giant mission accomplished banner a la george bush and gulf war but in fact i think i photoshopped myself onto that one a long time ago but we we really did there was there's nothing to talk about except for the complete wing nuts that are out there the ashita kim's i don't know if you remember that name

he's a ninja master wrote a bunch of ninja books in the 80s yeah we tracked him down he was a dude named bradford davis living in a trailer in Florida. Neither Korean or Japanese, like his name. And Steven Seagal as well. He has featured on your website. Yeah, we went hard against Steven Seagal because a lot of the people are friends of friends or associates with Gene LaBelle. And I don't know if you know that story.

And I love bringing up the story because it's like third hand for me. But yeah, Steven Seagal was on the set. Gene LaBelle, judo master, stuntman legend. Just a guy who's amazing. because it's like third hand for me. But yeah, Steven Seagal was on the set. Gene LaBelle, judo master, stuntman legend. Just a guy who's amazing. He's been in like so many films, background characters. The guy that's getting thrown through the window.

Anyway, was on the set of one of the Steven Seagal films. And as the story goes, Seagal was like bragging that nobody could choke him out. And so Gene LaBelle was like, okay. He put him in a choke. Obviously, Steven Seagal couldn't get out. And there was a sort of a brown pants result that involved lawyers and threats of lawsuits. And yeah, but the story got out.

And so you're retelling it because fuck Steven Seagal. That guy. And he's a good example because he also went from all the horrors, if you go into his history of what he did in Japan and various things. I'm sure most people don't pay that much attention to him. But he ended up like a Putin apologist. Basically any reactionary political movement, he's happy to be in the mix there.

I think he gave up his US citizenship and he's Russian now. So whatever. Good. Stay. the mix there so i think he gave up his u.s citizenship and he's russian now so whatever good stay you know and then another big one from the day was uh frank dukes who was the was the the subject of the movie blood sport john claude van damme movie that just complete and utter bullshit turns out frank dukes never competed in a kumite there never was a kumite and he bought the trophy that he displayed to people from the trophy store like down the street from where he lived and he's had a vendetta against us for years the guy because he's still around still trying to teach people how to be ninjas grown men trying to be ninjas and then you know which is hilarious because he's over in europe a lot and we have an admin over there in europe it's this giant dude he goes by jazir on the forums former united states army major just

he's a beast and it was like standing next to him on a train like over in europe like doing he was actually doing ninja stuff right behind frank dukes so he loves to tell that story because this guy's supposed to be like hyper aware and he's the secret master and yeah jazeera was just like stinking i could kill you i could totally ninja kill you so yeah there's the personality to kind of just bullshit without because obviously those people know that they are not people who trained under some secret master in japan or that they are not, they haven't killed all these people and been sent on secret missions, but they don't, they're able to, you know, lie and seemingly in a way that they feel very convinced of what they're lying about. And the only thing that I can think of apart from in health and wellness were secret tantric masters, or there's a lot of the same kind of things

in play. But like you said at the beginning it's not not that in mainstream politics uh people just lie and exaggerate and trump is the the best example of it but he's just leading the vanguard of what it feels like a kind of new wing of politicians who are completely okay with just bullshitting about their abilities and experiences. So yeah, the fact of this extending out of martial arts definitely seems your expertise is necessary. Yeah, no, and it's the same. It's seamless. It's the same tactic. They prey on people who have a need to feel some sort of identity to connect with a tribe, to see themselves as having some sort of status in the world where they probably don't. They probably work a menial job.

Their home situation's crappy. Maybe they got stuffed into a locker in high school. They need to feel something. And it's the same thing that maybe Trump tapped into, is a lot of the people that are seeing their options in life dwindle. They're seeing some of their privileged statuses become more equal to other people. They're seeing a lot of stuff happen and they're losing things that they had. And now they're seeking some sort of thing to make them feel strong about themselves.

And that goes, that's a playbook that's been in use for at least since the 30s. Yeah, that sense of grievance and resentment is a strong one. Yeah, it feels like there's two ways you can go with any topic, whether it's health or martial arts. And you were talking about how martial arts is naturally suited to an empirical scientific approach if you really care about winning. So let's say if you really care about being strong, physically strong, then you'll care about nutrition and you really care about winning. So let's say, or if you really care about, you know, being strong, physically strong, then you'll care about nutrition

and you actually care about the genuine stuff and you'll be strongly motivated to discriminate the stuff that works from the stuff that just sounds good. And funny story, somebody who is arguing against the empirical peer review of sparring is somebody that's very well known to you. And this was, and Chris brought it up to me and I had not seen this before, but yeah, our good friend, James Lindsay had like a decade ago or so posted an essay, which referenced us. I like my website

as a bunch of people that were just trying to push their sparring mentality on. And I don't remember the exact quotes. I don't want to you know misrepresent him here but he was making an argument against the need to have the contact sparring to have that peer review to subject yourself and i as far as i know all he trains in is like uh forms or some sort of push hands like light grappling kind of stuff and some wheeling around a big sword and that kind of thing in his driveway but i may have seen that i may have seen something that was the other side of the argument and so we upset a lot of people by saying yeah you need to actually test whether or not you can do what you think you can do or you should do something else and and it's hilarious that he as the defender of whatever he's going off of these days was on the

really the wrong side of that issue personally i'd love to fight the guy just i think that'd be hilarious i'm just throwing it out there james if for some reason you're listening to this let's do it man ufc united unified mma rules there you go everyone nobody expected the decoding the gurus to be the place where they throw down but there you go I'm calling you out man somehow I don't think this is going to go down I did the same thing to Alex Jones and he's local so I'm sure word never got back to him you should have a better

chance there because of the amount that he never endlessly praises his physical prowess and fighting ability which if you've seen the guy i don't know where he's getting that assessment from he looks like a bag of old ham i mean that would not be that would be hilarious and would be fun but it would wouldn't be fair so i yeah no i'd still fight a young guy's a young guy. I have a story about that. About Al Shonzo.

Apparently he did show up at a jiu-jitsu school where a buddy of mine was a senior student there. And he lasted exactly one lesson. So, according to the story that I've been told, so take it with a grain of salt. But yeah, so he got paired with a 130-pound female blue belt on his first day and she wrecked him and he never came back yeah that's a very familiar uh like thing for anybody that trained in jiu-jitsu for time that there are people that come with a very aggressive attitude and they tend they either learn quickly to to drop that or they just don't come back that's really common do you want to know whether or not you're good and then refine that or do you want to just feel like you're tough so it's a really good just way of sussing out somebody's character i love it there was a question i had

as well frost about it again this might be like availability heuristic in effect but i noticed that hasn't applied so much recently, but in the past, like Sam Harris had started training in Brazilian jujitsu and he would talk about it fairly often. And he, in some sense, he was making a point similar to what you were about that this is testing your actual ability to, to fight, right. Or you're, you learn quickly that you're high on coordinated and how easy it is to be choked by someone or this kind of thing. But then, I don't know if you know, but Russell Brand is also into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and he was talking about that. And I noticed, I know that just

Brazilian jiu-jitsu became popular. So it was a lot of celebrities were doing it and talking about it like Anthony Bourdain as well and so on but I wondered if you noticed something of an overlap between the kind of rationalist IDW type like the people who might take the attitude that you're talking about like testing things and and as a result say mma and arts that have sparring are important or was that purely just an overlap that came about because it was more in the cultural zeitgeist i've noticed there there's two tiers of people that participate in brazilian jiu-jitsu for example There's some really smart dudes that have gotten into it. I've known they've come through the forums or they've gone off.

We have one on our board of advisors who's an immunologist. But yeah, they've gotten into it because they do realize, hey, this is effective and it's good for me and it's a good thing. So if I'm going to train in something, I have a limited amount of time, I'm going to do something that's probably got the least uh risk a reasonable risk of getting you know injured while i'm doing it so probably not going to get punched in the face every class i go to and then something that's going to be actual useful and effective brazilian jiu-jitsu fits that niche so it attracts a lot of smart people and yes there's a little bit of something that's about let's just come through there's a

little joe rogan has a wide audience sam harris has a wide audience among people that are a little bit consider themselves smarter at least yeah there's a lot of overlap and then you have the whole middle-aged white dude thing too which you know is also a factor because there's a ton of them that do present jiu-jitsu and it's kind of yeah so it overlaps it's sort of like a martial arts intersectionality kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you, I just noticed that, like, because I felt that in some ways I should be Sam Harris's ultimate target audience because, you know, he's an atheist with an interest in Brazilian jujitsu and yeah, and talks about religion all the time. So he should be my guru, but not exactly. Cynical bastard, you just weren't having it ready.

I didn't. I actually used to, I used to have a sort of contrarian streak where I defended them against the people in my discipline because he was seen as like, amongst the cognitive science of religion people, they treated him as something of a punching bag that his view was really unsophisticated. But I always felt within my field, within the academic field, that the basic point that there are plenty of religious people in the world who are genuinely motivated by their beliefs and that doctrines that are extremists can believe in things which are harmful and not motivate them to action. That's not the whole story, but I felt that my field was a bit too much focused on saying anybody that has that view has a very superficial grasp of things. But unfortunately, the more you

pay attention to Sam Harris, the more you see severe his, the level to which he applies skepticism and does research. Yeah. So anyway, Joe Rogan in a sense. So he's like Joe Rogan with like two extra standard deviations of IQ. So he's, yeah, I mean,

he's, but, and I listen to Harris every now and then he's had some good episodes of podcasts. He tries. Yeah. And that's what makes me a little bit more sympathetic to him he tries he he operates a good faith he wants to understand he has disagreements in blind spots and by i'm certainly no academic at that level but i i see

the merit in what he's trying to do and it's good and i i was super proud of him we he disowned the idw because it just went off the rails yeah so that was that had to be brutal it had to hurt a lot of feelings he deserves credit for that yeah that was we both enjoyed that right it was it felt therapeutic in a sense to hear someone like from within that group say the the thing to the other people because you know critics they don't care about but they couldn't ignore that he called out the it shouldn't be hard. It really shouldn't be hard for somebody in that sphere to not endorse voter ballot conspiracies. But it's a low hurdle that so many people just slammed directly into and then rolled around on the ground, like scream

out about, yeah, the conspiracies and so on. So that was remarkable the post-election period has been really interesting in that sphere and i actually used to follow james lindsey i just stick his trolley kind of haha you know shit posting thing that didn't faze me at all in fact i don't get it i get it because that's the old internet that's a way you used to interact with people about it and it didn't bother me in the least, but it was that line when he started going off the deep end, I was like, no, okay. That like ironic shit posting seems like it wasn't so ironic.

This is actually, this was a point I was thinking about recently with the rise of Clubhouse and this recent incident, Matt, I think you're aware of this as well, about there was a room on Clubhouse taken over where Brett Weinstein and Michael Tracy and various heterodox or IDW type people were present. And they invited up somebody who was more social justice inclined who complained there was only white people um in control and then they complained that there was only white people with moderating abilities and when they were granted moderating abilities they kicked everyone off the stage invited all their friends up and proceeded the kind of lecture and berate the various people

about the yeah being being racist and equating evolutionary biology to eugenics and so on and like that incident is it's so stupid it's internet minutiae but the thing was that it came out of that because i heard several people discuss it on podcasts and i'm sure there will be sub stacks dedicated to dissecting the event and YouTube videos about the great takeover of Clubhouse. But the thing it reminded me of is this, the internet that you are familiar with and are from, which is people in group chats on chat forums or message boards and these little interpersonal dramas about people doing things and taking over accounts. And I got the feeling with this event that I was like in deja vu. And similarly, the last thing I'll mention,

and shut up just to hear your takes on this, is I heard Sam Harris on Clubhouse recently, and he was debating a guy about whether atheists can have morality because they don't believe in an objective God. And it was the same arguments that was like, and it was a pretty shitty conversation he had, but I was just like, I've done this 20 years ago on the internet, like all these debates about can atheists have morality? And it just struck me as, my God, we're back again with with sam harris debating like someone so yeah i i wonder what your take is on the differences of the web 2.0 versus the old internet and whether it's just the same

shit i mean i am biased i think everybody should just go back to forums because i have one so that would be great for me but i i do i think we need to decentralize, like just have everything back to sort of middle niche communities where you can have if you want it highly moderated and you just want people to post everything and cite their sources in APA format. OK, you can do you over here. And if you just want people posting videos themselves yelling at the screen, then you do that. And you can run the forum for the types of discussions that you want. And it's really hard to cancel any discussion that's like that. If Brett Weinstein wants to go talk about how, whatever he's talking about this week, I'm not going to get, that's your thing, but yeah, so they can have their own little thing and you can sign up and if whatever,

and then you can go start another one. It's like brettweinsteinsucks.org and have your own forum. It's just dedicated to that. It was a more alive back then. It was, I don't know. I'm a big decentralization kind of guy because what was it? You're, you guys were talking about to live recently and a system like that's more resilient.

The discussion is more resilient. The culture is more resilient when it's not under one set of rules yeah and i think that's an interesting point of view you have different niches and diversity of places and rather than everything all mixed in together yeah i mean twitter definitely has that effect on people where people are continually slamming into some someone else who's just living in a completely different planet. You know, one person's an academic in Oxford, the other one's whatever, I don't know,

a Texan who runs a business or something. And not always, but often they're just coming from just completely different perspectives, different sets of assumptions, and it's not, bringing them together is not all unless they choose to come together on a particular topic is not always good. And Twitter does that. It's got benefits and costs, right? Because I also think that in a lot of sense, the dynamics that you're talking about recapitulate on Twitter, that there's a group of people that you interact

with regularly, who you know, and have relationships with. And then there's just randoms who fly by to just slam you over something or people who have an insane amount of time available to nitpick a very specific issue. So maybe the main difference with Twitter is I feel if you write a thread and you say, I really hit this book by Tim Scott or something. No, like that Tim Scott's a made up name. But, you know, that Tim Scott may come into your thread and say, thank you for your feedback. I think what I was getting at is I made a separate account, this, you know, anonymous account, because I wanted to keep my other, my random interest separate from my straight-laced academic work. As it happened, thanks to Chris and Decoding the Gurus, the worlds collided and it all fell apart.

But it was a good idea. Even now, I'm followed by people who are into coding statistics in R. There's a good number of them. Culture warriors. And I could be, you know, when when i say something now i've got to think how is how are all the different segments reading this because yes i like the smaller communities is what i'm saying i can see the benefits yeah so i don't want to take up all your day for us especially since you kindly stayed up late for us. But I like the metaphor

of the kind of training yourself to deal with like the bullshit that is out there in all the different spheres. And that I really think there is a nice analogy, even just from a rhetorical standpoint of people training their mental abilities to, to point out or to recognize gurus and recognize bullshits. And I realize throughout this conversation, we've probably touched on a whole bunch of things. But if I put you on the spot, what do you think are a couple of points that people could do that?

You mentioned the different types of razors, right? The article that you wrote about. But what abilities do you think are good self-defense online against bullshit and also about falling prey to online gurus that aren't necessarily peddling martial ability, but they're certainly peddling a whole bunch of intellectual abilities that we cover every week. I know it's a bit unfair to just randomly ask someone, but are there any things that you would highlight that are important? I think the more you want something to be true, the more you need to be aware of that.

You need to be in tune with yourself and know, okay, yeah, this appeals to me. I want this to be real. And then you need to flip a switch and say, how is this not real? What is wrong with it? What are the flaws? This idea, if this appeals to me on what level, why is it appealing to me on that level? It doesn't make me feel something. Do I want to identify with this or is it appealing to me? Because I, genuinely feel that there's a grain of truth in it that I'm going to explore and see if it holds up. So you kind of, it's just basic, the skeptical principles about stuff that you got to be more skeptical with yourself before anything else. And it's like I said, a lot of the gurus, they might not literally be selling

something, but they're selling themselves. They're selling their personality. When it comes to reading the news or getting information about what's going on in the world, I try, my thing is to point out now is if somebody is putting their face in front of it more than the information, if you're watching a video and it's just a guy talking at the camera, you're not being informed as much as you are being charmed. So, and I don't agree with this guy's politics, but there's a video YouTuber called Renegade Cut that does a lot of breakdowns of movies, but he also gets into philosophy and stuff like that. And he never shows his face in there. It's just presenting information. He presents sources and ideas and arguments, and he's not trying to charm you with anything other than

the content. So that is a good model for a heuristic to say, hey, OK, am I being charmed or am I being informed? And that's something that's critical now because half the people out there get their information from some guy sitting there talking out of camera. And they're like they're getting their opinions. And then they just go off out into the world, out in social media, and they regurgitate what they've heard of some lesser variation of it. And then we just have a bunch of noise rather than signal we have a lot less discourse we just have just battling like meme content and we got to get past that we got to try and suss out the arguments the differences in what we we think is true figure out what is true and then just base policy on facts

what we think is true, figure out what is true, and then just base policy on facts. So if everybody can decouple what they want to be true from what their best effort towards understanding is true, then I think we already have colonies on Mars by now. Yeah, I think that's really well said. I've often thought that myself, which is that the biggest obstacle to getting a clear view of something is yourself and the things that you want to believe, the things that make you feel good to believe, make you feel self-righteous and confident, and all the other good things that come with having these opinions. And there's a classic psychology paper which is called Opinions Are Like Possessions. So in the sense that possessions can give you a feeling of security, can give you a feeling of status and all of these other things that we use possessions to signal, both to give a feeling for ourselves, but also to signal to other people.

He proposes that ideas and opinions are the same thing. So we have to be careful of that. Are we believing this thing because it makes us feel good or because it's in tune with reality? So that was the first thing you said, which I really liked. And I think the second thing you were hinting at, which is paying attention to the form in which gurus or any source of information, the form that it has. And I think you don't need to be an expert in a particular, you know, in discipline areas, whether it's climate science or epidemiology or whatever. But if you pay attention, you can see the form and the style that they're using to be convincing.

And I think with a little bit of practice, one can spot those red flags. So, yeah, great. Very DTG. You're an honorary. We're going to nominate you as an honorary durometrician. No, I'm not going to fight you. I'm not going to fight you.

Be afraid. It's very like classic Star Trek. We have a pit and there's weapons thrown around. You could take on two small monkeys i think before matt like yeah monkeys yeah but as usual with the combat the two men enter one man leave we could we get to choose our weapons and i'll choose an armored vehicle of some kind and good luck matt i read your chances you'll be fine. But there was, I had an idea. We can always like completely cut this out if it doesn't work.

But I enjoyed this when I asked Matt about it on the Patreon. So from the gurus that we've covered first and or gurus that we don't know. So like if you haven't seen the episodes, feel free to just, you know, pick anyone that you like. the episodes feel free to just you know pick anyone that you like i wonder is there anybody like if you had to if you were forced to get dinner with one of the online gurus of the modern age who would you select as like for whatever reason whatever your personal reason is just with which guru would you sit down to have a nice dinner with how it would be to lab uh like that would be great i would fight that guy too because he's a beast i mean that that would be a scrap that that dude he deadlifts he's solid so yeah that'd be great and i mean i i am

i'm part-time military so i'm an instructor for the military part-time too so i mean his little charade of being a chest thump and trying to bully people, that's not going to work on me. That'd be hilarious. So I can out-bully him. So, yeah, I'd love that. Yeah, I think that's a good fact because like James Lindsay would just be a nightmare

at dinner guests. He would just want to get to the fight component where with Pallet, it would probably be a conversation that at some point leads to a fight because of his character. And I think, like you say, he would probably do reasonably well. Like I can imagine him. Oh, there's a good chance he'd kick my ass. So I have no doubt.

So I'm okay with that. So this has been very entertaining and informative as well. I always forget to do this bit whenever we do the interview. So I will say that we have the Decoding the Gurus podcast. Yeah, we have the accounts, which are on Twitter, R4CDent, Matt pseudonym, IMC underscore Kavanaugh. And the account for the actual show is guruspod on Twitter. And we have an email decodingthegurus at gmail.com.

And this episode will probably come out after the Kendi one. We haven't. Oh, no, we have announced the next guru is Gwyneth Paltrow. Don't fight her, Frost, please. There's no need. her frost please there's no need but you can find frost at frost p-h-r-o-s-t on twitter and also check out his website bullshido.net um and if there's any other links and the podcast yeah any other links you want to share there uh frost we will put them in the show notes and uh thanks very much for coming on the the other thing i forgot to mention was that the podcast that you have first i've been listening to it and i can't remember the name of your co-host

but you have like he he's a researcher right in like with knowledge about viruses and vaccines like genuine knowledge oh yeah that we have Dr. Jason Goldsmith on. He's an MD, PhD immunologist. Yeah, we have him on regularly. So there's a lot of the staff that host it. So we kind of interchange. We've got an attorney on the staff that does it, Derek Debus.

And so we have a rotating cast of hosts, but yeah, Jason's fantastic. And he has been all over this. He called 300,000 deaths by the end of the year. He said eventually it's going to be over half a million. So the guy, he shouldn't be proud of the fact that he got it right. Yay. The contrast for me is I think I listened to Brett and Heller who, like you said, what did they discuss? They mainly discussed the coronavirus and culture war topics. And then I listened to them talk about the vaccines and then your podcast in one occasion

that was like on my feed. And the level of the gap in expertise and relevant knowledge was, it's hard to over exaggerate just the night and day distinction that was there and the amount of caveats and stuff that were genuinely inserted. So I just want to say that you've covered it already, but for people who might have an interest, not just in the martial arts side of things, but the combating bullshit and useful information about the coronavirus, Your podcast has been great. So I heartily recommend it to the listeners. Thanks a lot for coming on. And yeah, the usual difficulties with signing off are there. So you can say bye bye. Okay. So for us, we always say really strange bye-bye. Bye-bye.

I actually changed it to you should grovel at the feet of your muscle master, which seems, yeah, that's it. Okay. There is a reason for it. But anyway, I'll leave it at that. Feeling comfortable now, Frost? Yeah, my hand's moving to the log out button. Where is it? He's gone.

He's gone. Bye. Bye. Thank you.